Wisconsin native, conservative critic of everything.
"Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the God." ---G K Chesterton
"The only objective of Liberty is Life" --G K Chesterton
"Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions" --G K Chesterton
"A man can never have too much red wine, too many books, or too much ammunition." -- Rudyard Kipling

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

What Prayer Is NOT

...Let's be as clear as possible here: prayer does nothing—absolutely
nothing—to God or for God. He doesn't need our prayer. Our prayer cannot
change His mind or influence His disposition towards us. The promises
He made to our ancestors in faith have been fulfilled in Christ Jesus
and every grace we will ever need has already been bestowed. To believe
that prayer elicits a response from God implies that we have some kind
of control over His will; that we—His creatures—can alter His will. This
idea turns faith into magic and a prayer into a spell. Prayers are not
incantations that guarantee us the results we desire. Let's remove from
our way of thinking about prayer any notion that we are capable of
generating or procuring or guaranteeing a gift from God through prayer.
True humility—the basis of all prayer—is achieved through perfect
surrender, through total detachment from any thought, word, or deed that
suggests we are in charge of the blessings we are given. St. Augustine
puts it succinctly, “Man is a beggar before God.”

So why all that praying stuff?

Prayer is a tool for turning sinners into saints.

Uhhmmmmhhh....he refers to the REAL end (or goal) of life. Sorry, folks--that's something the Gummint can't deliver.